Cyber Bag
Hey, I’m Austin. I built Cyber Bag because I was tired of buying things I already had, finding science experiments at the back of the fridge, and paying $7 for yogurt at one store when it was $4 across the street. Groceries are one of the few things we all buy constantly and still shop half-blind.
So Cyber Bag is a kitchen and grocery app built around what you actually have and what things actually cost. It tracks your pantry, plans meals around it, and turns those plans into a shopping list. Every price comes from a real shopper at a real store — no partnerships, no inflated “suggested” numbers — so you can compare stores and catch sales with data instead of guesswork.
On top of that it’s a community: people share recipes, write how-to guides, review products, ask questions, and pass along food they can’t finish before it spoils. The whole catalog is built by the people using it — logging a price takes about 15 seconds, and the Contribute page is the easiest way in.
Home
Your home page is a feed of what other people are cooking, eating out, and saving on. Posts, recipe reviews, product reviews, food-rescue listings, and the occasional rant about $9 lettuce — all in one place. Switch the sort to Hot, New, or Top, or jump to a single source like Restaurants or Products if that's all you came for.
- Sort tabs at the top — Hot (default), New, Top.
- Source tabs let you filter the feed to just Restaurants, Products, Recipes, or Food Sharing.
- Right column has filters for "Who you know" (people you follow + your team) and tags.
- Composer at the top: write a post, add photos, drop a link, and tag a recipe or restaurant via Google Places.
- Click into any post for the full thread with nested comments.
- On a profile, "Get inspired" follows them; "Add to team" creates a two-way connection so you can assign each other tasks in the planner.
Discover
A recipe search page that knows what's already in your pantry. Type in the ingredients you have, narrow by cuisine or cook time, and the app shows you what you can make right now (with a match percentage) and what you'd need to grab from the store.
- Type the ingredients you have. Each one becomes a filter pill.
- Narrow further with cuisine, meal type, cook time, or diet filters.
- Each recipe card shows a match percentage. Green means you're basically there, orange means you're missing a few things.
- Click a card to open the full recipe, or hover for a quick preview.
- Save it to a collection or drop it on the planner calendar straight from the card.
Planner
A calendar for what you're cooking, an occasions tab for events you're planning around (dinner parties, meal prep, holidays), and a shopping list panel that builds itself from whatever you've got planned. Expiring pantry items show up on their expiry day so you can use them before they go bad.
- Calendar tab — click + Add on any day to drop a recipe or create an occasion.
- Drag meals between days to reschedule. Multi-select days, then "Generate shopping list" to combine them into one list.
- Occasions tab — group multiple recipes together for an event. Assign Cook or Buy tasks to people on your team. Share an occasion with someone and they get a notification.
- Shopping tab — your active list. Check items off as you buy them, fill in the actual price you paid, and tap + Pantry to move it straight into your inventory.
- Right column on the shopping list shows existing products at this ingredient. Click one to pre-fill price and store. Can't find your product? There's a button to add it.
- History tab shows past lists and what you spent.
Pantry
Your kitchen inventory. Track what you have, in what quantity, when it expires, and what you paid for it. Items near expiry get colored badges so you don't miss them, and the price tracker on the right column lets you follow ingredients you buy a lot of.
- Click + Add Item to open the form. Search the master ingredient list — autocomplete picks the right one.
- Enter quantity, unit, expiry date, purchase price, and which store you bought it from. The store helps build the price catalog for everyone else too.
- Items are grouped by category. Red badge = expired, amber = expiring soon.
- Click any item to edit, split into batches (e.g. opened vs sealed), or delete.
- Right column: pick an ingredient and you can see existing products and prices for it. Use the price tracker to follow ingredients and get notified when something goes on sale.
Recipes
Recipe pages have everything you need to actually cook the thing — ingredients, instructions, scaled servings, nutrition info, an estimated cost, and a "Cooked" button that subtracts what you used from your pantry automatically. You can also leave a review with photos when you're done.
- Adjust the serving slider — every quantity scales with it, including the cost estimate.
- Cost section shows total + per-serving. Open the Prices tab to see which store has the best deal on each ingredient.
- Nutrition panel breaks down calories, protein, carbs, and fat per serving.
- Missing an ingredient? Substitution suggestions live right under the ingredient list.
- Click Cooked to open the cook modal. Review which pantry batches get deducted, adjust if needed, and confirm. Your inventory updates automatically.
- After you cook, leave a review with a rating, tags, photos, and a video link if you have one. Other users see this on the recipe page.
Guides
A guide is the how-to that lives next to a recipe — an overview, the technique tips, what to watch for, and how to make it ahead. Every recipe gets one written automatically when it's imported, and you can edit it with full formatting (headings, lists, links, inline photos). You can also write standalone guides in the post composer and share them with the community — those show up on the feed and your profile, and anyone browsing can filter for just Guides.
- Open the Guide tab on any recipe to read its step-by-step guide. Long guides show a table of contents built from the headings.
- When you add or import a recipe, the parser drafts a guide for you. Edit it in the rich text box — add headings, bullet lists, links, and photos — before you save.
- Want to write a guide on its own? Use the post composer, pick the Guide type, and write it like any other post. It posts to the feed and your profile.
- Attach existing guides to a recipe from the recipe's Guide tab — search by title and link one (or several). The AI-drafted one is marked as the default.
- Save any guide to a collection, and filter the feed or a profile to "Guides" to find them.
Shopping Mode
Open this when you walk into a store. It picks up the shopping list you're working on, asks if any items still need a store picked, and then shows a card for each store you need to hit. Tap a store, get the floor plan with pins for everything on your list at that store, check items off as you grab them, and Cyber Bag remembers where you were when you come back. Items without a store yet sit at the bottom — when you grab one, it asks where you found it so the next shopper has a head start.
- Open Shopping Mode from the sidebar (or jump in from the planner shopping list).
- Pre-flight prompt: if some items don't have a store picked, you can fix them in the planner first or just go shop with what you have.
- Store cards show every chain on your list with a "to grab / done" count.
- Tap a card to enter the store. Left side: your list at this store. Right side: the floor plan with pins for items that have a known location.
- Check items off as you find them. The matching pin gets an X overlay so you can see what's left at a glance.
- Items without a store sit in their own bottom section. When you check one off there, you can tap a spot on the current store's floor plan to drop a pin so the next shopper can find it.
- Tap Exit anytime — your progress is saved. When you come back, you pick up where you left off.
Contribute
The Contribute page is where you help build the catalog. There's one form to log a price you saw at the store, a barcode scanner that pulls product info from Open Food Facts, a receipt scanner that logs every line item at once, and a store layout sketcher so other shoppers can find products faster. Everything you submit shows up immediately and an admin reviews it after the fact.
- Add manually — type the ingredient (autocomplete shows matches), the brand and product (optional), the store, and the price. If something you type isn't in the catalog yet, it gets queued for review and goes live anyway.
- Scan barcode — snap a UPC and Cyber Bag looks it up in Open Food Facts. Then add the price you paid and the store you bought it from.
- Scan receipt — upload a photo of your grocery receipt. AI reads it, extracts each item, and you log them all in one go. Mark anything that was on sale so the regular vs sale price gets recorded properly.
- Store map — sketch the floor plan of a store. Pick a chain, pick a branch (or search Google for one we don't have yet), then paint where the aisles, produce section, checkouts, and entrances are. Other shoppers see your sketch when they're trying to find a product.
- Everything you contribute is visible to everyone right away. An admin reviews submissions and other users can confirm or dispute what they see.
Who I cook with
A page for finding other home cooks, building your team, and posting food you can't finish before it expires. Inspirations are people you follow one-way. Teams are mutual — once you're on a team together you can assign each other cook and buy tasks on occasions. Food Rescue is for posting pantry items someone nearby could come grab before they spoil.
- Discover tab — browse other users by activity and badges.
- Inspirations tab — one-way follows. You see their recipes and reviews in your feed.
- Teams — mutual connections. Both sides accept the invite, and once you're a team, you can assign each other cook/buy tasks on occasions.
- Food Rescue — post pantry items you won't finish in time. Add a photo, pickup instructions, and approximate location. Anyone nearby can claim it before it spoils.
Questions
A backlog of questions other users have asked on recipes and products — "is this gluten-free?", "did anyone find this at Costco?", "how spicy is it really?". Filter to unanswered ones if you want to help out, or just check whether someone already asked the question on your mind.
- Filter pills at the top: Unanswered or All, plus All sources / Recipes / Products.
- Sorted newest first. Click any question to jump to the recipe or product page where it was asked.
- You can answer right there in the thread. The asker gets a notification.
- When you're reading a recipe or product page and have a question, hit the question button — the asker is auto-subscribed so they get notified when someone replies.
Collections
Named lists of recipes, posts, or occasions you want to keep around. Like a Pinterest board but for food. You control who sees each one — public for everyone, private for just you, teams for the people you cook with, or specific users you pick by hand.
- On your profile, scroll to Collections and click + New collection.
- Name it, pick a type (recipes / posts / occasions), and choose visibility.
- Add items by browsing the relevant page and clicking the Save button → pick which collection to add it to.
- Other users' public and team-visible collections show up on their profile.
Notifications
A real-time inbox for things that need your attention — someone assigned you to cook a dish, a price dropped on something you track, a friend shared a shopping list with you, your question got answered. The bell icon in the sidebar shows your unread count.
- Click the bell to open the dropdown of recent alerts.
- You get notified for: occasion assignments, shared shopping lists, shared occasions, price drops on tracked ingredients, new followers, food share claims, and answers to your questions.
- Click any notification to jump to the relevant page (it's marked read automatically).
- Use "Mark all read" to clear them all at once.
- Notifications poll every 30 seconds in the background.
Mobile App
Cyber Bag is available on iOS and Android. The mobile app has the same core features as the web — feed, planner, pantry, shopping lists, contribute, and recipe management. Plus native barcode scanning with the camera, push notifications, and an in-store shopping mode optimized for one-handed use while you walk the aisles.
- Download on the App Store (iOS)
- Android: available via Google Play closed testing (production release coming soon).
- Updates are delivered over-the-air — no need to re-download from the store for most changes.
Multi-Currency
Cyber Bag supports CAD and USD. Prices are stored in their original currency and converted for display using your preferred currency. You can switch currencies from the sidebar pill, profile settings, or the filter sheet on mobile. Price inputs let you pick the currency per submission so you can log a USD price at an American store or a CAD price at a Canadian one.
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